A Candle For Kathleen
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day nine hundred and sixty-one: They've been dreading for this day to come, and now it's here. - Not Rory but Damian, see inside.


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 45th cycle. Now cycle 46!_

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_(cycle 46 cheat sheet will be up later)_

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**"A Candle For Kathleen"  
Beiste & Ewan (OC)  
Beiste & Ewan series  
_(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)_**

The feeling of it had been tightening around them for days it seemed. They couldn't figure out how they would feel when the day did come, but they couldn't stand the wait for much longer.

Then one morning, there they were. This was the day, the one which was to be Kathleen Healy's birthday. It would be the first since her death, and as much as both her son and her sister had been adjusting to life without her, on this day the old wound was met with a refresher.

Shannon had woken up, finding her morning ritual to protect her for just a little while longer, but only so far until her body and her mind betrayed her. On the mornings of her sister's birthdays, she would go about her routine, but on the end of that she would pick up the phone, sit, and call her sister.

She'd made it as far as grabbing the phone and sitting before she realized what she was doing, and when she did it knocked the wind out of her. The tears had come out instantly, and she couldn't have stopped them if she tried.

She had missed Kathleen, all those years with her living off in Ireland, but they could always call; they did, at least once a week if they could help it. Now she was feeling like she was forgetting her voice, her laugh, all the little noises here and there. Already her face had been relegated to still photographs and distant memories stored in her head, now she was losing all of her. She was fading… ghostly.

Losing her had made her so aware of everything she would put off in her life. All these years they had waited to visit one another, and now she was gone. Now Shannon's life had changed so much. She had Ewan, she had Rich… All these new things and it was as though she was benefiting from her baby sister's demise… It made her queasy to see it that way but she couldn't help it, especially today.

No matter how bad she felt about it though, she couldn't imagine how Ewan felt on this day. He had known her in these last sixteen years, Shannon hadn't. He had seen her, day in, day out, he had been her life, her and Glenn both had. If Shannon knew one thing about her sister it was how much her family meant to her. She knew being away from her big sister was not something she took without feeling regret, but it was how it had to be. If she hadn't met Glenn all those years ago she would probably have made it back home eventually, but then… she wouldn't have had Ewan. Shannon could spin as many scenarios as she wanted in which she wasn't kept from her sister or in which she didn't die, but she never looked at them like anything she'd really want, because she knew her sister had been happy, and it wasn't going to be tarnished by the way it had ended.

She took a breath when the tears had finally begun to quiet. She had to get up. She had to remember that in the next room there would be a boy feeling those overpowering emotions as strongly and stronger…

He'd been awake since two. He'd tried to go back to sleep, but now that he was awake he just couldn't get there. He just lay there, staring at the ceiling, his mind a total blank. It wasn't even that he was thinking about it, about her, his brain just wouldn't shut down. He just existed, waiting. His eyes felt heavy, and still they would not shut. Then all of a sudden there was daylight pouring in from his window to tell him it was morning.

It had taken him so long to get back on his feet, and then this happened. It would happen sometimes, a reminder here and there, but this was different. Before long there would be his father's birthday, too, and his own birthday, and the holidays, and then one day he'd wake up and it would have been a year… he just couldn't win.

With daylight the emptiness in his mind had started filling… with her. He wouldn't have known what to expect, but what he found was the dominant memory was the last time he'd seen her.

It was that morning, he had school, so he had gotten up, started getting ready. His mother had made breakfast, asked if he needed her to pick up anything while she was out. He had asked her to get him socks, he remembered that. She'd made a comment about how he had been needing some for a while, with the amount of holes in the ones he presently owned. She had asked him to fold some of the laundry before he went, 'since you're just sitting there,' she'd teased. He had done it, frowning the whole way, though he didn't really mind. By the time Ewan woke up, his father was already off at work so it was just him and his mother, it was time for them.

Finally he had presented her with the basket of folded laundry, she had kissed him and wished him a good day. He had left, and he had never seen her again. If he'd known, he never would have left her, if he'd known…

He wanted to get the crying out of him before he went out and saw his aunt. He knew it would come, just… as much as he tried, it wouldn't come, he just… stared. Finally he'd just had to get up and go out there. When he found his aunt with red eyes, open arms, he moved up and accepted the hold, closing his own arms around her, too.

"Morning," Shannon breathed, closing her eyes again. When she looked back to his face, saw how tired his eyes looked, she held her hands to his cheeks. "Did you sleep at all?"

"At all, yes. Just not a lot," he admitted.

"Are you hungry?" she followed up.

"Sure," he struggled. He didn't know that he'd really manage to eat a whole lot, but he'd try.

"Why don't we go out to eat?" she decided. The air would do them good.

Not all that long after, they sat face to face in a booth at Dee's Diner. The waitress had come, and when they'd both taken the blueberry pancakes, they knew why: they were Kathleen's favorite. It had made them smile. That was what the day was meant to be, not to remember that she was gone, but that she had been here.

"When your mother was… oh, I think it was her sixth birthday, she wanted to make her own pancakes. She dropped the whole thing of blueberries in there, so much that the pancakes felt like giant blueberry patties with bits of batter to hold the whole thing together."

"The pancakes held?" Ewan asked.

"Oh, yeah," Shannon announced proudly. "Not for long, but they held. It was a mess after, because they would fall all over the place and they stained, obviously…" she smiled. "But she was so proud of herself, our parents couldn't really be mad at her. The dress was never completely clean again, but she had a new play dress, so she didn't mind." Ewan chuckled, then thought.

"Can we make a cake… for her," he explained, hoping she'd be alright with it.

"Sounds like a plan," Shannon smiled to him.

Once they had gotten home, they had spent the time they made the cake swapping stories of the various birthdays of Kathleen, from Shannon telling of the year she had wanted a theme where everyone was assigned a color and had to dress only in that color, to Ewan talking about the year where they had ended up with five birthday cakes.

When this one was ready, they knew there was one finishing touch, a candle which Ewan lit. They had said their wishes to her, and then together they had blown out the candle. For her, they'd had a day of joy that was all about her.

THE END

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******A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.  
****In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are  
************always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!**


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